Pakistan, July 11 -- For over two months now, the Prime Minister's Citizen Portal has remained inexplicably offline. No statement, no timeline, just the deadpan message that the system is "under maintenance." This silence falls from a flagship e-governance tool that once won international recognition for "innovative public service delivery," having registered over four million citizen complaints. Now, not even one can be filed.

This episode is a stark metaphor for how governance is too often imagined in Pakistan: grand initiatives launched with full-page advertisements and trending hashtags, only to quietly collapse under the weight of poor planning and even poorer upkeep. We exist in a nation where the complaint system itself needs a co...